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ОглавлениеChapter 4
The National Liberation Struggle mode of politics in Africa, 1945–1975
The colonized’s challenge to the colonial world is not a rational confrontation of points of view. It is not a discourse on the universal, but the untidy affirmation of an original idea propounded as an absolute.
– Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961 (translation modified)
The problem of the nature of the state created after independence is perhaps the secret of the failure of African independence.
– Amílcar Cabral, Return to the Source, 1973
NATIONAL LIBERATION AND POPULAR EMANCIPATION
The truth which the event of Haiti 1804 opened up was that of the political emancipation of colonised African peoples, the idea of independence and the formation of African nations achieved by people themselves through their own efforts. It was indeed with the struggles for African independence in mind that C.L.R. James wrote his Black Jacobins (James, 2001: xvi). And it was the idea of the nation that lay at the core of independence and post-independence political subjectivities; in times of struggle it was understood as a pure affirmation, but with the advent of state formation it was to be proposed as a social category. The sequence of the National Liberation Struggle (NLS) mode of politics lasted approximately from 1945, the date of the Pan-African Congress held in Manchester, up to say 1975, 1973 being the year of the assassination of both Amílcar Cabral and Salvador Allende (Hallward, 2005). During this period a particular subjectivity developed through which national liberation and freedom were jointly thought in Africa in a specific manner. What makes the following investigation of the NLS mode necessary is that ‘nation’, the category through which freedom was thought is, in Lazarus’s terms, a circulating category, a category of politics as well as one of social science. In my terms, ‘nation’ can either be an ‘excessive’ or an ‘expressive’ category. I propose to look at the relations between the idea of the nation and emancipation primarily through the work of Frantz Fanon and, to a lesser extent, of Amílcar Cabral.
To maintain that nationalism in Africa has failed – or, more subtly perhaps, that it has deployed disastrous state politics, which coerce particular interests, as Chipkin (2007) does, for example – in current conditions when imperial domination and its attendant ideologies are still prevalent, and when these have altered their political form to stress a ‘democratising mission’ and ‘humanitarianism’, is simply to make it impossible to think new forms of nationalism, new forms of (non-identitarian) pan-Africanism, and consequently new forms of emancipatory politics on the continent.1 It means either resignation to the propaganda of liberal democracy and to the idea of the end of history, along with the final admission that ‘capitalo-parliamentarianism’, with its massive levels of poverty and oppression and its constant need for war, is the best of all possible worlds with no chance of change in sight, or a simple retreat into dogmatism which can only reduce nationalism to its statist variety. Indeed, we need to bear constantly in mind that ‘we will never understand what constrains us and tries to make us despair, if we do not constantly return to the fact that ours is not a world of democracy but a world of imperial conservatism using democratic phraseology’ (Badiou, 2006a: 137). For those of us who live in Africa and in the countries of the Global South there is no path to emancipation that does not confront the power of empire in its neo-colonial form, which is only another way of saying that nationalism is not an obsolete emancipatory conception – far from it. The point is to distinguish it analytically and politically from the state itself. It is in this context of popular struggles for national liberation that ‘[the term] “people” here takes on a meaning which implies the disappearance of the existing state ... What is affirmed within large popular movements is always the latent necessity of what Marx considered the supreme objective of all revolutionary politics: the withering away of the state’ (Badiou, 2013a: 16, my translation).
But to affirm this is not sufficient. It is also important to analyse the character of the past sequence for which national liberation was the defining category, in order to bring out the singularity of its politics and to understand its limits and decline in terms of its own categories; to make sense of why it became saturated and therefore why the idea of freedom-in-the-nation lost its original emancipatory content. This requires more than can be done here, but what I wish to argue is that one reason for the saturation of nationalist politics in Africa was that these were not able to sustain an affirmative conception of the nation and that the nation gradually came to refer to a social category in the thought of politics as it unfolded over time. From a universal notion of national emancipation concerning all humanity, which is in Badiou’s terms ‘anobjective’, an ‘incalculable emergence rather than a describable structure’ (Badiou, 2009b: 26, 28), we gradually come to a notion of the nation founded on indigeneity, according to state political criteria.
It is through a discussion of the nation in Fanon’s work that this transformation of politics can be established at its clearest, as he was, with the possible exception of Cabral, the most accurate observer and theorist of this sequence on the African continent from within its own subjectivity. What is significant about Fanon’s three books on the Algerian national liberation struggle (1954–62) – which in the language of his time he refers to as a revolution – is that they were written from within the subjectivity of the sequence, as Fanon was a direct participant in the emancipatory struggle – a mass struggle – and was totally immersed in it personally, intellectually and politically. Fanon writes as an activist, a militant of emancipatory struggle.2 His approach is therefore not an academic one, asking what the essence (definition) of nationalism or the nation is, but rather one that confronts the much more political question of who constitutes the nation.
FANON AND ‘THE PITFALLS OF NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS’
Fanon’s work takes three related forms: firstly, sociological analyses of the struggle process and the transformation of popular consciousness, published in English under the inappropriate title of Studies in a Dying Colonialism (1989); secondly, political analysis and journalistic work, collected posthumously under the title Toward the African Revolution (1967); and thirdly, his critical reflections on the outcome of liberation as he was dying of leukaemia in his deservedly most well-known work, The Wretched of the Earth (1990).3 In all three books the dominant theme concerns the change in subjectivities among the masses of the people, the nationalist party, the state and intellectuals both in Algeria and in France. In particular, it is a popular conception of the nation, which he sees as arising when ‘ordinary’ people acquire the confidence of their power, the confidence of control over their destinies, that lies at the core of this work. It is this point that is made again and again, in remarks such as the following: ‘The living expression of the nation is the moving consciousness of the whole of the people; it is the coherent and enlightened praxis of men and women. The collective construction of a destiny is the assumption of responsibility on a historical scale’ (1990: 165, translation modified).
We have here the twin ideas that the nation is produced and that it is made – ‘imagined’, to use Benedict Anderson’s well-known term – from the actions of men and women, of people in general, and not by any structural developments (such as markets or print capitalism) or, for that matter, by any intellectual narratives (Chatterjee, 1986). This consciousness is therefore both one of the creation of the nation through the actions of people and its suppression by colonialism. This process, which Fanon sees as people transforming themselves as they make the nation, refers in Badiou’s terms to a ‘subjective becoming’; it is the ‘untidy affirmation of an original idea propounded as an absolute’ (Fanon, 1990: 31). It amounts to a clear excess over what exists, over the simply extant. As we have seen, this process in Badiou’s ontology is an event for politics simply because something appears that had not previously existed (Badiou, 2006a: 285). Subjectivity is thus transformed in hitherto unimaginable ways. What appears for Fanon is precisely the nation.
For Fanon, then, the nation is constructed in practice, in political struggle by people themselves; it is a purely political notion, much as it was for Jacobin nationalism during the French Revolution. We could say that it is simply ‘presented’ as a prescriptive affirmation and that it does not ‘represent’ anything outside itself. There is no given colonial subject; subjectivation is a political process of becoming. However, the construction of this subjectivity is not a spontaneous occurrence for Fanon, but a revolution in thought. What is spontaneous is rather the Manichaean dualism of the good embodied in the native versus the evil embodied in the settler. But the nation is not in any way to be equated with a social category of the native, as it is a purely political category. In fact, many settlers ‘reveal themselves to be much, much closer to the national struggle than certain sons of the nation’ (1990: 116) while many natives are to be found on the side of colonial power; ‘consciousness slowly dawns upon truths that are only partial, limited and unstable’ (p. 117). It is militants who have found themselves thrown primarily among the people of the countryside that gradually both learn from and teach the rural masses the construction of a nation in action: ‘these politics are national, revolutionary and social and these new facts which the colonized will now come to know exist only in action’ (p. 117, translation modified). In this manner the nation is constructed through agency and is not reflective of social entities such as indigeneity, ethnicity or race. It is a nation that is made up solely of those who fight for freedom; it is a uniquely political conception. Here the subject is actually created by an ‘excessive’ subjectivity, by the practice of liberation at all levels, collective, individual, social (hence Fanon’s studies of changes in the family, of the veil, of the effect of the radio, etc.).
An underdeveloped people must prove, by its fighting power, its ability to set itself up as a nation, and by the purity of every one of its acts, that it is, even to the smallest detail, the most lucid, the most self-controlled people. But this is all very hard ... The thesis that men change at the same time as they change the world has never been so manifest as it is now in Algeria (Fanon, 1989: 24, 30).4
Yet the role of the leader, of the ‘honest intellectual’, is not to impose a ‘party line’ or his supposedly superior knowledge, but to be faithful to a politics of ‘confidence in the masses’:
To be a leader in an underdeveloped country is to know that in the end everything depends on the education of the masses, on raising the level of thought, on what is sometimes too quickly called ‘politicisation’ ... To politicise the masses ... is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to make the masses understand that everything depends on them; that if we stagnate it is their responsibility, and that if we go forward it is also due to them (Fanon, 1990: 159, translation modified).
When Fanon refers to ‘we Algerians’ or to ‘we Africans’, as he does on many occasions (e.g. 1967: 196; 1989: 32; 1990: 159), it is clear that he is referring to a conception of the nation that is not based on ‘nationality’ as commonly understood. We are not in the presence here of a notion of the nation founded on indigeneity, nor is it one founded on ‘race’. Fanon was a foreigner and a non-Arab as well as not an African. Yet I also think it is important to point out that his biographer is quite mistaken to search for the source of this view in Sartrean existentialist theory and thus to maintain that ‘for Fanon, the nation is a product of the will, and a form of consciousness which is not to be defined in ethnic terms; in his view, being Algerian was a matter of willing oneself to be Algerian rather than of being born in a country called Algeria’ (Macey, 2000: 377–8). This position constitutes a misunderstanding because it fundamentally depoliticises the question by reducing it to Fanon’s psychology. This view was not simply Fanon’s; it was also that of the people involved in a struggle for national liberation in which ‘the women, the family, the children, the aged – everybody participates’, as Adolpho Gilly puts it in his introduction to Fanon (1989: 8), while continuing by noting that those who risked their lives for independence ‘were not only Frenchmen or Arabs; they were also Spaniards, Italians, Greeks – the entire Mediterranean supported an Algeria in arms’ (p. 15). This subjectivity, then, did not belong to the subject Fanon alone, but was the subjectivity of the sequence; it was that which was ‘obvious’ because its obviousness had been produced by the politics of the situation. In any case, this identity (Algerian) was not just chosen by Fanon; it also refers to how others saw him as well as the other ‘foreigners’ active in the struggle. It is in fact a purely political identity. Fanon’s conception of the nation is not a matter of a psychological act of will; it is rather a question of a subject being produced by fidelity to the collective subjective politics of the (emancipatory) situation.
In sum, the point is to recognise that politics exists beyond identity and that it cannot therefore be reduced to the psychology of individuals. Such a politics consists fundamentally of a politics of affirmation, which is at the core of all emancipatory politics and which is both singular and universal in nature. Indeed, it is only on this subjective basis that an inclusive society can be built; only a politics of affirmation can effectuate a conception of the nation that breaks completely from notions of indigeneity. Thus: ‘we want an Algeria open to all, in which every kind of genius may grow ... in the new society that is being built, there are only Algerians. From the outset, therefore, every individual living in Algeria is an Algerian’ (Fanon, 1989: 32, 152, emphasis in original).5 For Fanon, national liberation was a universal politics concerning humanity as a whole and not a matter of attaining independence in a particular country. Unsurprisingly, national liberation could only be non-identitarian and pan-African in its vision, and this pan-Africanism could only be popularly based:
The optimism that prevails today in Africa is not an optimism born of the spectacle of the forces of nature that are at last favourable to Africans. Nor is the optimism due to the discovery in the former oppressor of a less inhuman and more kindly state of mind. Optimism in Africa is the direct product of the revolutionary action of the masses ... The enemy of the African under French domination is not colonialism insofar as it exerts itself within the strict limits of his nation, but it is the form of colonialism, it is the manifestations of colonialism, whatever be the flag under which it asserts itself (1967: 171).
In this affirmation regarding the universality of national liberation and freedom, a clear similarity can be observed with the writings of Toussaint Louverture during the Haitian struggle for freedom. This is not surprising; after all, we are, in both cases, in the presence of an excess over the extant and hence of the (re-)assertion of a universal truth. But Fanon’s thinking on the formation of the nation is not reducible to that of the formation of a state, and freedom for him is not synonymous with the simple fact of independent statehood.6 Rather, following Rousseau, the people are not considered as a simple given, as in various ‘populist’ positions, but have to first constitute themselves as a collective political subject.7 For Fanon, the core process in national construction is precisely the formation of a people and thereby the changing of social relations and of personal consciousness also, as the effectuation of a nation is premised on this process. It is this that founds the universality of the human. For Fanon, then, in Algeria as in Haiti, it was people (les gens) who constituted the nation by constituting themselves as a people (un peuple), not the state.8 And the people did so through a form of politics that, while not necessarily opposed to the state as such (but only to a particular kind of state, the colonial state), distinguished itself fundamentally from state subjectivity. It is in this sense that any emancipatory politics can be said to always exist ‘at a distance’ from the state. Moreover, the concept of ‘the people’ is understood here as a political concept, not as a social one.
Yet, at the same time as affirming the political universality of the human, Fanon’s nationalism is one founded on a category of the people ultimately represented by a party. This creates a difficulty for his thought of politics, for the idea of the people is no longer exclusively self-created but also represented, which implies that it is created in a political space by a party. Along with the category of class, ‘the people’ comes to be conceived of as a ‘circulating’ category – as a sociological grouping as well as a self-created political subject – with the result that we are also confronted by a reductive relationship between the objectively social and the subjective. This becomes apparent when, immediately after independence, a class whom Fanon refers to as the ‘national bourgeoisie’ detaches itself from the people and becomes unable to contribute to the making of the nation, as its interests link it closely to colonial power. Indeed, the ‘national bourgeoisie’ excludes itself from the nation; it is unable ‘to rationalise popular praxis, in other words to understand its rationality’ (2002: 145, my translation), and so finally excludes itself from the people themselves, for it is
only a sort of greedy caste, avid and voracious, with the mind of a huckster, only too glad to accept the dividends that the former colonial power hands out to it. This get-rich-quick middle class shows itself incapable of great ideas or inventiveness. It remembers what it has read in European textbooks and imperceptibly it becomes not even the replica of Europe, but its caricature ... The national bourgeoisie ... must not be opposed because it threatens to slow down the total, harmonious development of the nation. It must be stoutly opposed because, literally, it is good for nothing (1990: 141).
It should be apparent here that the national bourgeoisie refers to a social category as well as a political category. ‘It’ is a socio-economic entity that acts politically coherently; it is a political subject. It is this circulating notion of class – a category circulating between political economy, on the one hand, and the thought of politics, on the other – which enables Fanon to analyse the decline of the politics of the people-nation and their replacement by state politics, by the politics of the nation-state, for the national bourgeoisie succeeds in representing the whole nation as well as its own interests: ‘nationalism, that magnificent song that made the people rise against their oppressors, stops short, falters and dies away on the day that independence is proclaimed’ (p. 163). It is clear, then, as Lazarus (1996: 207) makes plain, that it is not the advent of a state politics that destroys emancipatory politics but the saturation of emancipatory politics that makes statism possible, for ‘the return of a state logic is a consequence of the termination of a political sequence, not its cause. Defeat is not the essence of effectuation’ (my translation). To understand the way Fanon analyses this process, we have to look first at the role that the category of class plays in his argument and then at his understanding of the party. Both these categories clarify the limits of Fanon’s emancipatory thought and, more especially, the subjective political impasse faced by the NLS mode of politics itself.
Fanon accounts for the collapse of nationalism into a statist project primarily by reference to the collapse of liberatory pan-Africanism – ‘African unity, that vague formula, yet one to which the men and women of Africa were passionately attached’ (1990: 128) – into a vulgar xenophobic chauvinism after independence: ‘we observe a permanent see-saw between African unity which fades quicker and quicker into the mists of oblivion and a heart-breaking return to chauvinism in its most bitter and detestable form’ (p. 126). The reason for this is to be found, for Fanon, primarily (but not exclusively) in the economic interests of the national bourgeoisie, who wish to move into the posts and the businesses vacated by the departing Europeans. As a result, they assert a form of nationalism based on race and indigeneity in order to exclude; their concern is with access to resources, and a claim to indigeneity is, from their perspective, the only legitimate way of privately accessing such resources. Fanon notes that ‘the racial prejudice of the young national bourgeoisie is a racism of defence, based on fear’ (p. 131). In any case, whether the concern is accumulation or asserting a ‘narrow’ racially based nationalism (p. 131), ‘the sole slogan of the bourgeoisie is “Replace the foreigner!”’ (p. 127). As a result:
The working class of the towns, the masses of the unemployed, the small artisans and craftsmen for their part line up behind this nationalist attitude; but in all justice let it be said, they only follow in the steps of their bourgeoisie. If the national bourgeoisie goes into competition with the Europeans, the artisans and craftsmen start a fight against non-national Africans ... the foreigners are called to leave; their shops are burned, their street stalls are wrecked (1990: 125).
The nation now refers to something other than a purely subjective collective affirmation; it refers to a social category founded on indigeneity. Who is and who is not an Algerian, a Ghanaian, an Ivorian, now becomes defined in terms of a state politics founded on asserting indigeneity: birth, descent, history, race or ethnicity. We should note that it is not simply a class politics that is at stake here, one representing economic interest, but more broadly a politics associated with ascribing the nation to an objective social category of the indigenous; a politics concerned with maintaining divisions, hierarchies and boundaries: in sum, a state politics. It is thus the state that defines the nation in social terms and that is unable to sustain a purely affirmative politics. The nation is now a representation, no longer a presentation. At the same time, this statist way of defining the nation is gradually naturalised in thought, as given by history and communitarian ‘belonging’ (birth, descent, etc.). Yet it should be abundantly clear not only that it is the effect of a state form of politics but that such naturalisation is made possible by its social embeddedness; for it is impossible to naturalise the purely subjective without first locating it in the social, without objectifying it. Moreover, the state also technicises as it depoliticises, something which Fanon deplores, emphasising that ‘if the building of a bridge does not enrich the awareness of those who work on it, then the bridge ought not to be built and the citizens can go on swimming across the river or going by boat’ (1990: 162). Harsh words. Fanon’s difficulty consists in not being able to imagine a more appropriate political response to the technicism of the state, for when faced with the saturation of emancipatory political thought and the exclusive offer of technical solutions in the form of ‘development’, people will think it better to have a bridge than none at all.
Fanon is thus fully aware of the collapse of a politics of popular affirmation into statist subjectivities, yet what he sees as the way out of this problem is limited precisely by his understanding of class politics and the representative role of parties. His difficulty is no more than that of the politics of the NLS mode. I outline some of the fundamental features of this mode of politics below; at this point it is only necessary to note that its categorial features are such as to locate it squarely within 20th-century ways of conceiving politics. Broadly speaking, this mode is one that followed the 20th-century’s conception of politics, which saw parties as the core term of such politics (in the 19th century it had been insurrection and movements). As I have already noted, the revolutionary party, though inaugurated by German social democracy and theorised by Lenin’s What Is to Be Done?, was seen by all shades of radical opinion throughout the century as ‘representing’ socio-economic classes and groupings in the political arena (Lazarus, 2001a, 2007). Parties were understood as the link between the social and the political domain structured around the state, and they recruited their members from throughout the population. Their class character was thus determined less by the social origins of their membership than by their ideological positions, which were said to ‘reflect’ class in political subjectivity. Mass parties of this type developed in Europe after, and often as a reaction to, the Paris Commune of 1871. For some social-democratic parties, it was a matter of organising the working class to avoid a similar disaster; for others, it was about drawing workers into their organisations so as to enable the control of bureaucracy and elites.9 Of course, the objective of the party is for its leadership to ‘capture’ state power. Radical Left-wing parties thus began with a contradictory character, one that exhibited a certain anti-state or mass revolutionary content along with an ambition to control the power of the state through which social programmes of various sorts could be technically enacted. Without exception they were founded on a politics of the representation of the social.
In Africa, similar contradictions characterised the party founded upon and ultimately leading the disparate organisations of interests making up the ‘national liberation movement’. In an African context, nationalist parties were recognised as the sole ‘genuine representatives’ of the nation often long before independence itself, as colonial regimes and nationalist movements battled for legitimacy. It was through the party that freedom was to be actualised both in the form of political independence and in the form of socio-economic development, which was to provide the much needed economic independence from the West to the benefit of all in the nation. In Kwame Nkrumah’s famous biblical aphorism: ‘Seek ye first the political kingdom and all shall be given unto thee.’ Freedom in the NLS mode could only be attained through control of the state, as it was only the state that could drive the process of ‘catching up’ economically with the West – the only guarantee of full independence in the long term. From the nation being equated with the people, it came more or less rapidly to be equated with the state; given its social foundation, ‘national consciousness’ could therefore easily collapse from a pure affirmation into a state-legalised indigeneity. For Fanon, the party was a problematic but necessary form of organisation. Popular politics, like class politics, could only be realised through a party; the people or the class could only become a political subject through the medium of a party; and thus the nation could only become the agent of its own liberation through the state.
The party of nationalism, for Fanon, exhibited highly problematic features after independence, as it had gradually evolved from an organisation that enabled popular expression into an apparatus of control: ‘The party which used to call itself the servant of the people, which used to claim that it worked for the full expression of the people’s will, as soon as the colonial power puts the country into its control hastens to send the people back to their caves’ (1990: 147).10 It ‘controls the masses, not in order to make sure that they really participate in the business of governing the nation, but in order to remind them constantly that the government expects from them obedience and discipline’ (p. 146). In addition, the party itself becomes the vehicle for private enrichment, which itself is both cause and effect of the formation of a ‘national bourgeoisie’ that chooses the option of a one-party state. Thus Fanon notes, ‘the bourgeoisie chooses the solution that seems to it the easiest, that of the single party’ (p. 132), while ‘the party is becoming a means of private advancement’ (p. 138). The party gradually becomes a vehicle for representing the interests of this new bourgeoisie rather than those of the people.
On the other hand, Fanon proclaims the necessity of the party by adhering to the view that solutions to political problems are never thought outside the party conception of politics itself. Thus ‘the party should be the direct expression of the masses ... [and] the masses should know that the government and the party are at their service’ (1990: 151, 160). To actualise this situation and to curb the power of the ‘national bourgeoisie’ it is still a party form of politics that Fanon invokes: ‘the combined effort of the masses led by a party, and of intellectuals who are highly conscious and armed with revolutionary principles, ought to bar the way to this useless and harmful bourgeoisie’ (p. 140, translation modified).11 The notion of the party is at the core of the problem in Fanon’s thought, as is the notion of the masses or the people. Broadly speaking, Fanon’s politics conform to the prevalent view of the 20th century that ‘the people’ are to be understood as the subject of history and that they effectuate their agency by being represented in the political arena by a party. For him, the party in power must represent the people accurately, and after independence the state-party must have a humanist programme to enable a transformation of society in the people’s interests; it cannot be a simple vehicle for enrichment: ‘In fact there must be an idea of man and of the future of humanity; that is to say that no demagogic formula and no collusion with the former occupying power can take the place of a programme’ (p. 164). Nevertheless, Fanon remains well within a subjectivity of representation. Politics must accurately represent the social.
The problem with Fanon’s politics is its inability to transcend subjectively the limits of the party-state, despite his extremely accurate observations about its bureaucratic and controlling functions. As Lazarus (2001a) has observed, the party has the effect of fusing popular consciousness with that of the state, as party discourse maintains that popular consciousness can only be realised in practice through the party and its control of state power. In this way the party enables the fusion of the subjectivity of politics with the subjectivity of the state. What this means is that the liberation of the people is to take place through control of a set of institutions that cannot conceive of liberation/freedom, as their existence is premised on the reproduction of hierarchies of power and the social division of labour. It is this – the ideological fusing capacity of the party – that makes possible the transition from the nation as political affirmation to the nation as social category, which, in other words, makes possible the party-state and the nation-state, the latter being nothing but the final objective form of this subjective fusion. Whether there is one party or several is of little significance; nor is the replacement of ‘party’ by ‘movement’, as in either case these are said to represent the social. Rather, what is of importance is the subjective conception that maintains that politics can only be effectuated through the (party-)state.
Subjectively, then, state politics is a reaction to what Badiou (2009a) would call the ‘event’ of the popular emancipatory sequence. Fanon himself provides the best example of an individual who commits himself to forming part of a collective political subject and whose consistent fidelity to the event enables it to become a truth: ‘The true is that which hurries on the break-up of the colonial regime; it is that which promotes the emergence of the nation’ (Fanon, 1990: 39, translation modified). On the other hand, the reactive subject embodied in the state’s political subjectivity is one which maintains that, although it enabled the formation of a newly independent state, the emancipatory sequence was little more than mindless violence. Yet this is not all. As we have seen, Badiou also refers to an ‘obscure subject’ also resulting from the same event. In the realm of politics, Badiou associates this conception with that of fascism, although in the context of neo-colonialism it more accurately refers to the neo-colonial discursive powers of occlusion: according to these, the specificity of colonised formations is said not to exist, colonialism is now over and was supposedly beneficial anyway, independence was granted by the ex-colonial power, etc. In this way the stage is set for regular antagonism between state nationalism and neo-colonial oppression, as well as for the contradictory character of nationalism itself, partly critic and partly adherent of colonial and neo-colonial discourses (Chatterjee, 1986).
The reactive subjectivity attempts to reduce the Idea to the social and thus depoliticises, statises and socialises it so that the earlier world continues to all intents and purposes; it attempts a distortion of the Idea, often through the use of expertise in social science. The obscure subject, on the other hand, tries to delete the Idea altogether. We can see relatively clearly the reactive and obscure subjects unfolding in subjectivity in the postcolonial period. In particular, the project of ‘nation-building’ understood as a state subjectivity, constituted in Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, amounts to a state reaction to the idea of the nation as subjective becoming, which Fanon outlined so clearly and which he wished to extend into a humanist project (Gibson, 2003).12 Fanon’s humanist project, which depended precisely on human agency, ends up being replaced by a ‘nation-building’ project founded on a technicist – technicist because statist – project of national development, which is unavoidably combined with patronage power relations, given the absence of an independently organised popular politics (Neocosmos, 2010b). Concurrently, the shift to xenophobic nationalism noted and deplored by Fanon is an indication of the rise of communitarian politics, as obscurity is allowed to descend on a purely political conception of the nation. Fanon is the only major theorist of African nationalism in the 20th century to develop a conception of nationalism – in his terms, ‘nationalist consciousness’ – that is non-identitarian, while all state forms of nationalism are identitarian in their essence. It is because Fanon’s conception of the nation and nationalism is non-identitarian that it forms the basis of an emancipatory politics of becoming.
Such an emancipatory conception of the nation can only be understood in excess of state politics. As soon as such politics are objectified and related to social categories, we become situated within an identitarian politics that is state-focused (e.g. through the medium of a party or a movement) and that contributes to making a sequence illegible. Moreover, while in the immediate postcolonial period state politics at least had a national project, today the disappearance of any genuinely inclusive conception of the nation, even at the level of the state itself, has allowed for the development of a communitarian identity politics that feeds on the kind of free-for-all which the new forms of neo-colonial domination have enabled. Recent events in Kenya (2007), South Africa (2008 and, even more recently, 2015), Nigeria (2009 and 2010) and elsewhere illustrate this rise in communitarian politics. It is in this context that what used to be known as the ‘national question’ is crying out to be (re-)addressed; it is within this same context that nationalism today must be given new forms in order to recover the kind of subjective becoming that Fanon extolled in the Algerian people’s struggle for freedom.13
The nation today is modelled by a politics of exclusion, itself founded on social indigeneity. Yet, in the 1960s and 1970s in Africa, such xenophobia was limited in its extent by a number of intervening conceptions in state politics such as a certain (although recast) statist pan-Africanism, a statist nationalism (which did, however, suggest a certain amount of independence from neo-colonial prescriptions) and a conception of national development along with its frequent requirement for foreign migrant labour. Today, post-1980, these restraints are no longer present. The old idea of the nation has been largely undermined in a neo-liberal context where nationalism as a unifying project has been largely evacuated from thought. As a result, an obscure subject of the nation has come much more prominently to the fore in Africa, producing a simulacrum of Fanon’s national consciousness.
THE NATIONAL LIBERATION STRUGGLE MODE OF POLITICS IN AFRICA
To think purely subjectively about an NLS mode at a Third World level, and even at an African level, in the 20th century is extremely difficult without collapsing into model-building, i.e. into objectivism. Moreover, there is no single major individual who has expressed such a politics intellectually. A situated analysis of the work of Cabral, for example, as one of the major thinkers in this regard, is well beyond the scope of this book. Yet there is an important sense in which such a mode provided the parameters of political thought regarding the colonial and neo-colonial social formations of the immediate post-World War II period up to the mid-1970s. Its main figures included such disparate thinkers as Mao Zedong, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Mohandas Gandhi as well as Fanon, Cabral and Nyerere closer to home, each of whom expressed a (more or less) different variant of the NLS mode. During this period, it was impossible to think politics in Africa in the absence of some form or other of anti-imperialism, even if only in rhetorical guise. This contrasts with the position today, when all states (if not all peoples) clamour to be part of empire. As Chatterjee (2004: 100) has so accurately observed, today the new ‘empire expands because more and more people, and even governments, looking for peace and the lure of economic prosperity, want to come under its sheltering umbrella’. The underlying conception of state politics today, in what is commonly referred to as the Global South, is to be part and parcel of the new ‘democratic empire’.
We should start first by stressing the irreducibility of the politics of national liberation from colonialism, a point we have already encountered in our discussion of Fanon. Not many European thinkers understood this. One exception was Jean-Paul Sartre, who was able to show that, just as colonisation was centrally a political endeavour, so was the struggle for freedom (Sartre, 2006: 36ff). The solution to the problem of colonial oppression was thus not fundamentally economic (reducing poverty), social (providing health or educational systems) or indeed cultural or psychological, however much these factors may have played a role in oppression and resistance. Poverty, for the majority, was clearly insoluble under colonialism, as it was a necessary outcome of the colonial system. The demand for freedom is thus purely and irreducibly political and was to be found at the core of nationalist politics,14 especially of the mass politics that were in some cases unleashed in the struggles against colonialism, and evidently this required transformation in both personal and collective subjectivities. As Issa Shivji never tires of repeating, nationalism grew out of pan-Africanism and not the other way around. Pan-Africanism was founded on the demand for universal freedom, justice and equality for all African peoples and was perforce irreducible to narrow national interest. It was only a state nationalism that could eventually abandon pan-Africanism for a particular sociological conception of the national interest. At the same time, the struggle for freedom had a universal character given that humanity could not possibly be free in the presence of the colonisation of certain peoples by others. Talk of the ‘human’ and his or her rights under these conditions was totally hypocritical, as Césaire (1972) rightly noted.
Politics as subjectivity was therefore the core issue of the struggle for independence, and politics gradually ‘withered away’ as the state took over nationalist concerns with independence, as the ‘people-nation’ was replaced by the ‘nation-state’, as popular nationalism was transformed into state nationalism, and as democracy was overcome by the need to solve the ‘social question’ (Arendt, 1963) or what was known in the postcolonial period as ‘development’. The excessive subjectivities of the liberation struggle were rapidly replaced by expressive ones. The absence of (emancipatory) politics on the continent in the postcolonial period has been noted by Shivji (1985). Yet he was arguably not able to expand this observation to fully think through the disappearance of politics as being occasioned by the rise of the state and its replacement of popular self-activity, thus arrogating all political agency to itself. The difficulty faced by the NLS mode was its inability to sustain an irreducibly political conception of politics, since freedom for its proponents was to be attained through the building of a new state – a contradiction in terms if there was ever one. Through the medium of the state-party, an excessive affirmative conception of politics with a universal emancipatory content was gradually replaced by a politics founded on interests (economic, power, cultural, rights and entitlements) that were to be managed by the state. This became an obvious intellectual problem for Marxist analysis after independence, as it was clearly a particular state politics that created the social in the form of a ‘bureaucratic bourgeois’ class rather than the expected opposite of politics ‘reflecting’ the socio-economic category of class (Shivji, 1976).
The reasons for the difficulty in thinking the emancipatory character of mid-20th-century anti-imperialist politics are arguably related to the fact that, while ostensibly concerned with emancipating colonial populations from an oppressive state, the NLS mode equated such emancipation with the construction of a nation-state. It thus combined both excessive and expressive subjectivities in a contradictory manner; it had both an anti-state and a statist aspect to it. We have already seen that this was a feature of Fanon’s thought; similar conceptions can be found in Cabral’s writings and in that of all major nationalist thinkers.15 In fact, Cabral (1973: 840) goes so far as to recognise quite lucidly – having had experience of many African states at first hand – the core problem posed by the nature of the postcolonial state in achieving popular emancipation. The problem of the post-independence state, he stressed, is ‘the most important problem in the liberation movement’ (emphasis in original). This fundamental contradiction was apparent in that it was always easier to be clear on what the NLS mode was against – as in ‘decolonisation’, ‘anti-imperialism’, ‘anti-racism’– rather than what it was for. Independence easily became the lowest common denominator, although equality and justice were also present to various extents in popular practices. Indeed, it would have been impossible to sustain any mass popular mobilisation without such practices and assumptions. Cabral expresses the limit of what was thinkable within the NLS mode of politics: the problem was the kind of state built after independence – it could not be the state itself. Today we must not remain prisoners of this limit.
In general, the NLS mode was predominantly a mode conceived, to use Lazarus’s term, ‘in exteriority’ in Africa, and was hegemonic in thought probably between 1958 (the date of the All-African People’s Conference in Accra) and the mid-1970s.16 The NLS mode is a truly 20th-century mode,17 and its language was frequently borrowed from Marxism, particularly from the Stalinist mode, though the term ‘class’ was usually displaced by that of ‘nation’, with Cabral even speaking in terms of a ‘nation-class’, to reconcile Marxist and nationalist conceptions (de Bragança and Wallerstein, vol. 1, 1982: 69). Following Lazarus, its main external social invariants were the ‘state’ and the ‘nation’ (which was equated with the ‘people’). At the same time, mass struggle against the colonial state and its racist politics contained elements of antagonism to the state as such, particularly the subjective fusion of the nation with the people in practice through an emphasis on equality. We therefore have in this mode a fusion in thought between people, nation and state, with the first two names dominating during periods of mass struggle and the latter two dominating most obviously after independence.
By 1975, the last vestiges of popular-democratic struggles had ended with the independence of the Portuguese colonies of Africa (and Vietnam at a world level), followed in 1980 by that of Zimbabwe. Even though the language of this mode was dominant within the South African African National Congress (ANC) in exile, whose perspective on the liberation struggle was largely congruent with that mode, I shall suggest in the next chapter that during the 1980s in South Africa a new sequence of politics was inaugurated. During 1984–6 in particular, evidence exists for the beginnings of a new singular (internal) mode of politics for the continent, although such a mode was never fully developed (as evidenced by, inter alia, the absence of any figure to systematise it theoretically). The nationalist form of struggle had organised military violence at its core. For Fanon, violence liberates both self and nation, i.e. it creatively distinguishes the nation and the people from colonial violence. The combination of the exercise of violence as a counter to colonial violence with the democratic aspirations of the people is located in the people’s army, people’s war and the political practice of guerrilla warfare. The guerrillas were to be the people in arms, the armed militants; the guerrilla army was the people at war: ‘we are armed militants, not militarists’, Cabral proclaimed (cit. Davidson, 1981: v). The various sites of a genuinely emancipatory mode of politics, when that existed, varied, but were likely to include the mass movement and its constituent organisations, the guerrilla army and peasant communities. Militarism was a statist deviation from this conception (easily fallen into, given the centrality of ‘armed struggle’), when technical military solutions became dominant over political ones. Given the centrality of organised military resistance, which frequently became a dogma, the dominant trend – however much this was opposed by thinkers like Cabral – was for national liberation movements to end up providing a mere mirror image of colonial politics in their subjective practice.
In general, in the same way that a demarcation of a ‘proletarian politics’ was central to the Bolshevik mode, the demarcation of a ‘national politics’, of the nation itself constituted by such politics, was central to the NLS mode. The questions of this politics were thus: who is the nation and its people? (not, what is the nation?) and what are its politics? The answer provided – at least by the most emancipatory versions of that mode – was that the nation is constituted by those who fight consistently against colonialism and neo-colonialism – hence by a certain amount of political equality. To the extent that this was adhered to, this politics could be said to be partly structured ‘in interiority’. The nation is not race, it is not colour, it is not class, it is not gender,18 it is not tradition, it is not even state, but through transcending these divisions it is open to all Africans, irrespective of ethnic, racial or national origins, i.e. to all people. It is a purely political subjectivity (Neocosmos, 2003). In Cabral’s terms: ‘In Guiné and Cape Verde today the people ... mean for us those who want to chase the Portuguese colonialists out of our land. They are the people, the rest are not of our land even if they were born there. They are not the people of our land; they are the population but not the people. This is what defines the people today’ (Cabral, 1980: 89).
Hence the question of who was a member of the nation or the people acquired a purely political, not a social or historical, answer. As we have seen, for Fanon, the nation during the liberation struggle was also a purely political construct undetermined by any social category other than those who simply lived there (e.g. Fanon, 1989: 152). As a result, this politics was coloured by pan-Africanism, which only gave rise to a contradiction once nation was equated with state. In the meantime, national consciousness was mediated by the popular movement. In Cabral’s words: ‘if imperialist domination has the vital need to practice cultural oppression, national liberation is necessarily an act of culture ... The liberation movement must ... embody the mass character, the popular character of the culture – which is not and never could be the privilege of one or of some sectors of the society’ (Cabral, 1973: 43–4 emphasis in original).
Thus, in so far as the nation has a social base, it is the poorest, the most excluded (the ‘wretched of the earth’) and particularly the rural peasantry who form it. The nation has a bias towards the rural; not only are rural people a numerical majority, but they are the most politically excluded (the ‘in-existent’, in Badiou’s terms); they have nothing to gain from the continuation of colonialism; only they can be truly universal and consistent in their demand for national freedom and democracy. The (petty) bourgeoisie and workers, as well as the inhabitants of the towns more generally, acquire some benefits from colonialism; they vacillate politically and are not consistently anti-colonial; their political and cultural references are to the metropolis. There is, among the bourgeoisie in particular, a tendency to ‘compradorisation’ evidently realised during the postcolonial period (Shivji, 1985). In the final analysis, the nation is composed of those who fight consistently for national freedom, irrespective of social origins. This is what national politics amounted to for this mode, at least in its popular-emancipatory version, in so far as this existed. Yet the constant reference to the class foundations of the politics of national emancipation throws up a contradiction expressed most clearly in Cabral’s well-known remark concerning the need for the petty bourgeoisie to ‘commit class suicide’ if it is not to betray the objectives of the struggle for national liberation:
in order not to betray these objectives, the petty bourgeoisie has only one road: to strengthen its revolutionary consciousness, to repudiate the temptations to become ‘bourgeois’ and the natural pretensions of its class mentality; to identify with the classes of workers, not to oppose the normal development of the process of revolution. This means that ... the revolutionary petty bourgeoisie must be capable of committing suicide as a class, to be restored to life in the condition of a revolutionary worker completely identified with the deepest aspirations of the people to which he belongs (Cabral, 1980: 136).
The contradiction consists in the fact that, despite the insistence on the idea that politics represents class interests, it becomes apparent that if liberation/emancipation is to be achieved, especially after the moment of independence, interests must be superseded by a politics irreducible to class interest. While understanding this crucial problem, Cabral is only able to express it in moral rather than political terms, to move out of politics into psychology and the apolitical: ‘This alternative – to betray the revolution or to commit suicide as a class – constitutes the dilemma of the petty bourgeoisie in the general framework of the national liberation struggle ... This shows us, to a certain extent, that if national liberation is essentially a political question, the conditions for its development stamp on it certain characteristics that belong to the sphere of morals’ (p. 136).19
It is arguably, therefore, the problem of political representation that lies at the core of the difficulties faced by the NLS mode. The fact that representation was mainly understood in Marxist – or, in the case of Cabral, Leninist – language does not constitute its main problem, for even when national liberation came to be understood in liberal terms (as in South Africa in the 1990s) the problem remained. In sum, the NLS mode was caught within its own subjective limits. However, only in a small number of cases was a politics inspired by this mode not thought exclusively by means of external referents. These rare instances, in the writings of Fanon and Cabral in particular, were brief and contradictory. What is interesting to note is that both these figures were spared the status of becoming ‘state revolutionaries’. Fanon in particular was excluded by his foreignness from holding high office in Algeria and died at a young age, while Cabral was assassinated before assuming state power. Of course, it was the national movement (made up of a ‘front’ or ‘congress’ of a number of organisations) that usually embodied the organisational subjectivity of the nation, not always a party as such. However, there were differences here: parties were, for some (like Fanon), Western imports with few roots among the people; for others (like Cabral), the party represented the vanguard: ‘Why have we formed a party and others formed movements? ... We called it Party, because we understood that to lead a people to liberation and progress, the fundamental need was a vanguard, folk who show in fact that they are the best and can prove it in practice’ (1980: 85).20
The dominant tendency, of course, was for political movements to become state parties more or less rapidly as popular politics were gradually fused with the state. This subjective fusion is apparent in Cabral’s last speech before his assassination in 1973:
The proclamation of the existence of our state ... will be the basis of the active existence of our nation ... legitimate representatives of our people, chosen by the populations and freely elected ... will proceed to ... declaring before the world that our African nation, forged in the struggle, is irrevocably determined to march forward to independence without waiting for the consent of the Portuguese colonialists and that from then on the executive of our state under the leadership of our Party, the PAIGC, will be the sole, true and legitimate representative of our people in all the national and international questions that concern them (Cabral, 1980: 289).
Yet at the same time Cabral was aware that the character of the postcolonial state is at the source of the problem of the failure of emancipation, although he was unable to think a way out; the NLS mode had reached the limit of what could be thought within its parameters. As I have argued, this equating of the nation with the state was ultimately a necessary outcome of seeing politics no longer as affirmative, but as representing the social in the form of the indigenous, evidently so at independence and in many instances long before that, at which point the emancipatory character of politics had collapsed. In all cases, the first step to freedom was said to be the attainment of state power for the emancipation of the nation. Nkrumah’s aphorism – ‘Seek ye first the political kingdom and all shall be given unto thee’ – accurately expresses this collapse into a disastrous state politics, leading often to a simulacrum of national emancipation and culture (as in Mobutu’s notion of authenticité, for example), since the instrumentalist notion of the state which it implied meant that the state was left largely untransformed from its colonial origins. Yet, in a postcolonial situation, the redress of national grievances could not avoid coming into conflict with private property itself, for the private clearly represented racial-national dispossession as well as being the foundation of capitalism. It is also for this reason that anti-colonial struggles often expressed anti-capitalist sentiments and that ‘state nationalism’ and ‘state socialism’ could easily be fused in the 1960s, when national freedom was equated with socialism, which itself was equated with social justice.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
As I have shown, the NLS mode of politics was based on a contradiction that it found impossible to overcome: the struggle for freedom was a struggle not only against the colonial state, but to a certain extent against the state itself, like all struggles for freedom; yet at the same time freedom was said to be attainable only under the aegis of an independent state, as it had been frustrated by colonial domination. The nation, which in the struggle for freedom was equated with the people, became gradually fused in thought with the state, evidently so at independence. It was these contradictory tendencies that assured the ephemeral nature of any genuinely emancipatory content to the NLS mode, and the continuation of a colonial set of institutions and practices from which the continent has been suffering ever since. The neo-colonialism that ensued was thus primarily a political phenomenon; the submission to economic dependency on the West was a result of such politics and not its cause, as dependency theory maintained. In addition, the deployment of this mode during the international geopolitical context of the Cold War and its fetishism of state power led to its frequent ideological dependence on either the Stalinist or the Parliamentary modes, a fact that ensured its final disintegration and collapse into statism. One can see, therefore, how easily a politics with an emancipatory content could tip over into relying on external invariants, when subjectivity became derived from the state itself, as the movement became nation, became party, became state. Although this movement from an excessive to an expressive mode of thinking politics was most evident at independence, for many national liberation movements the transition to proto-states or ‘states in waiting’ was effected long before independence (e.g. PAIGC, SWAPO, ANC; see de Bragança and Wallerstein, vols. 2 & 3, 1982), many being recognised by the United Nations as ‘the sole and authentic representatives’ of their nations prior to taking power.
The sequence of this mode of politics in Africa, with all its contradictory attempts to resist colonialism, is today clearly over, and has been so for about 30 years. Yet as Hallward (2005) asks, can we begin to speak today of the end of this end? I shall suggest that there is evidence from South Africa to suggest that we can. I now want to ask the question about the extent to which the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa of the 1980s may have broken with this NLS mode of thinking politics. I will suggest that it did indeed do so in significant respects.
NOTES
1.The South African White Left’s elitism and strident opposition to nationalism are notorious. Such opposition has been paramount among radical social historians and was evident in the 1980s at a time when mass resistance was being unleashed throughout the country and the nation was being constructed on a popular basis, as I shall show in chapter 4. For example, Pillay (2009: 244) notes the lack of engagement with Black nationalist thought among scholars of the History Workshop at Wits University in the 1970s and 1980s; he cites Worger (1991: 148–9) as remarking that two of the leading figures of the History Workshop (which, incidentally, purported to study the consciousness of the oppressed) ‘argue that white radicals in the 1970s and 1980s, feeling rejected by the black consciousness intellectuals and appalled by the “sorry record of independent Africa”, stridently opposed (African) nationalism and supported a “stark privileging of class over race”’. The fetishism of class and the inability to take nationalism and popular politics seriously have, arguably, been two of the major political problems of the independent South African Left as a whole and the reasons for its consequent political irrelevance.
2.In his Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon is said to write less as an activist and more as a philosopher-critic; this is apparently why this particular work is preferred by postcolonial theorists. While this book is organised around the opposition White–Black, The Wretched of the Earth is organised around the opposition coloniser–colonised. What connects them both is fundamentally an uncompromising disgust with the degradation of some humans by others. For an important introduction to Fanon’s thought, see Gordon (2015).
3.The version of The Wretched of the Earth referred to here is the 1990 Penguin edition translated by Constance Farrington. Where I have thought that the translation is not particularly accurate (as when the French word ‘colonisé’ is regularly converted into the English word ‘native’), I have translated myself from the French edition (Fanon, 2002). In such cases my translation or modification is indicated.
4.The thesis referred to by Fanon is evidently Marx’s third thesis on Feuerbach, see Introduction, n. 38
5.‘This principle of inclusion [in the nation] had a special significance for Fanon because it was intimately linked to the idea ... that every new step towards liberation would transform whites as well as blacks, colonizers as well as colonized’ (Cherki, 2000: 106).
6.In Culture and Imperialism (1993), Edward Saïd argues that many African nationalist thinkers, including Fanon and Cabral, distinguished between independence and liberation; in other words, that they did not see an independent state as the sole objective of nationalist politics. It is difficult to disagree with this point; the problem, however, is that, although noted, the distinction is not fully theorised in Fanon’s work in particular.
7.‘... before considering the act by which a people submits to a king, we ought to scrutinize the act by which people become a people, for that act, being necessarily antecedent to the other, is the real foundation of society’ (Rousseau, 1979: 59). For a discussion of this point, see Balibar (1996: 101–29). See also Gordon (2014) for an important discussion of Rousseau’s concept of the ‘general will’ in relation to Fanon’s ‘national consciousness’.
8.It should also be noted that Fanon (1989) insists that the formation of a people is also a process of self-transformation as well as one of the change of social relations in the direction of greater egalitarianism.
9.See David Beetham (1974, esp. ch. 4) on Max Weber’s conception of politics, for example.
10.In what amounts to a brilliant study of Fanon’s thought, Sekyi-Otu (1996) argues that Fanon deplores the absence of an ‘organic’ link, in the Gramscian sense, between the party and the masses characteristic of the independence struggle, as soon as postcolonial power is established. In consequence, hegemony, ‘that mode of political authority in which force is ... tamed by consent to imperfectly shared ends’ (p. 149), is absent, so that crude violence and corruption become the standard rather than the exceptional features of the rule of the postcolonial bourgeoisie. The difficulty faced by Fanon, however, is greater than that suggested by Sekyi-Otu, as Fanon is caught, in the thought of his time, within the contradiction derived from thinking the ‘national bourgeoisie’ as a circulating category: as a socio-economic entity as well as a political subject represented by a party.
11.It is important to note that Fanon insists here on a subjective political orientation, namely ‘revolutionary principles’, yet the problems in sustaining such principles within a context of state politics are not thought through. A similar problem is encountered in Cabral’s notion of the ‘class suicide’ of the petty bourgeoisie, as the subjective excess over class interest is not theorised in his work, as we shall see below.
12.Similarly, the popular pan-African affirmation of the National Liberation Struggle mode of politics is gradually replaced by a reactive subjectivity of official pan-Africanism viewed as a mere agglomeration of states.
13.One attempt to warn against ignoring politically the national question has been outlined by Mamdani (2008b) with reference to Zimbabwe and gave rise to an extensive debate. Although Mamdani’s warning that ignoring national grievances over land made possible the opportunism and authoritarianism of Mugabe’s nationalism in Zimbabwe, since addressing this issue resonated among significant numbers of people, is fundamentally a correct one, critics largely chose to respond by emphasising the appalling human rights record of the regime. Unfortunately, Mamdani himself remains at the level of thinking a state form of nationalism exclusively, while the majority of his critics ignore the relevance of the national question in favour of liberal notions of rights. As a result, the current form of the national question in Africa still remains unaddressed, especially from the position of the majority of people. See Jacobs and Mundy (2009).
14.‘... we must not waste time repeating that hunger with dignity is preferable to bread in slavery’ (Fanon, 1990: 167, translation altered).
15.For a recent assessment of Cabral’s thought, see Manji and Fletcher (2013).
16.The dates of this sequence can obviously be debated. At the level of the Third World as a whole, the mode probably began as early as 1910 with the publication of Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1958), which was a systematic critique of colonial values accepted uncritically by the Indian middle class. See Hardiman (2003: 66–93). The following very important remark, which illustrates the emancipatory character of Gandhi’s thought, is taken from this text (p. 72): ‘to believe that what has not occurred in history will not occur at all is to argue disbelief in the dignity of man’.
17.Although, again, its origins can be stretched as far back as the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804, as we saw in chapter 1.
18.See Fanon (1989: ch. 1) on the struggle of Algerian women.
19.The fact that in the same paragraph Cabral refers positively to this formulation as being in tune with the thinking of Fidel Castro indicates the extent to which such an apolitical notion of individual ‘morality’ was dominant in the NLS mode worldwide. Elsewhere, Cabral insists that ‘a reconversion of minds – of mental set – is thus indispensable to the true integration of people into the liberation movement. Such reconversion – re-Africanization, in our case – may take place before the struggle, but it is completed only during the course of the struggle, through daily contact with the popular masses in the communion of sacrifice required by the struggle’ (1973: 45). It is impossible to ascribe these intentions to a collective political subject, of course, as they are only attributable to individuals. Whatever the case may be, morality or individual commitment, the problem remains that, while he had understood the necessity for an excess over class interest in emancipatory politics, that political excess still remained untheorised by Cabral.
20.Lenin’s influence on Cabral’s thought of politics is apparent here. Given that Leninism was so central to the NLS mode and thus to the broader thought of emancipation in Africa in the 20th century, I will return to it in detail in chapter 7.
